Pure Pierre Politics

That’s how the criminal justice initiative — “cji” — is known within the Daugaard administration. The governor’s legal counsel, Jim Seward, and the governor’s budget director, Jason Dilges, explained during testimony Tuesday to legislators why the estimated cost of the reforms is higher now than when Gov. Dennis Daugaard delivered his budget recommendations in early December. The work group that developed the reforms proposal delivered its final report in November. It’s taken from then to now to further analyze the costs and personnel needs. Originally the governor recommended $3.6 million of one-time funding as part of the current 2013 state budget. Now the one-time amount is $4.2 million. The primary difference is the state’s cost for establishing the victim-notification system has risen from $200,000 of one-time funding to $790,000. Attorney General Marty Jackley said he’s decided to develop the notification system, known as SAVIN, in-house with the help of state technology experts after finding the outside estimates were too high for him to accept. The governor, for ongoing costs, recommended six new FTEs and $3.4 million in new funding in the 2014 state budget that starts July 1, 2013. Now those numbers are up to 19 new FTEs and more than $4.1 million for ongoing annual costs. The primary change there is personnel costs that went from $360,000 to $,1,059,000. The additional FTEs would be in social services to work in the addiction treatment services and in what’s known as evidence-based practices — the analysis of what’s working, what’s not working well and what can be improved. The EBPs, as they’re called, are in many ways the center of this new additional approach that’s being attempted in allowing non-violent offenders to get their lives right while staying in the community with their families and in their jobs, rather than going away to prison. South Dakota is behind most states in attempting this approach. Seward said South Dakota has the advantage of learning from those states. He made an interesting if painful observation about South Dakota’s experiment in the 1990s with juvenile boot camps. He said that approach wasn’t evidence-based. The boot-camp approach was dropped eventually as the Janklow administration ended, and it’s taken the eight years of the Rounds administration and the two years so far of the Daugaard administration to gradually steer juvenile corrections into a broader direction. The move into drug courts by Chief Justice David Gilbertson, and the Legislature’s support for those experiments in a handful of counties, was a transition during the Rounds years in the thinking about adult corrections. The current attempt at adult-offender reforms marks a willingness by the state’s courts system and the state’s prison system to embrace a similarly broader approach, building on the drug-courts model, which South Dakota was the last state in the nation to attempt, rather than solely locking felons away. Adding the FTEs and payroll for the data analysts and other additional personnel is an attempt to make the new reforms an evolving approach rather than hit-and-miss, up-or-down efforts.